Sir, – Prof John FitzGerald (“Climate change: Adapting consumer behaviour will be no easy task”, Opinion & Analysis, Business, November 10th) recently presented a welcome and insightful account of the key role of resource rationing in effective and just societal responses to previous globalised emergencies, including during the period of the second World War and the more recent rapid unfolding of the Covid-19 pandemic. He then – rightly – turned his attention to the almost unimaginably greater challenges presented by the climate crisis. Even this is not even an isolated threat but is compounded by human activities that are now simultaneously transgressing multiple other planetary boundaries such as biodiversity loss, freshwater use and excess flows of nitrogen and phosphorous. I naively assumed Prof FitzGerald was about to draw the inference that radical measures to bring societal activities back within a safe planetary operating space, such as rationing and other (just and socially negotiated) interventions, must now be seriously considered, here in Ireland and across the globe. To my surprise however, he did nothing of the sort: instead ruminating on the almost insuperable difficulty of persuading “households to change their behaviour” unless “there are good alternatives and appropriate signals”. It seems that, in the face of the greatest threats in the entire history of our species, the primary responses at our collective disposal are mild nudges for slow and marginal behaviour change. Apart from that, social agency in consumer societies is apparently so utterly lacking that we must reconcile ourselves to being passive bystanders in this planetary drama, who can only wait hopefully (or helplessly) for hypothetical technological innovations that mean, in effect, that nobody has to change anything in their existing conception of “leading a normal life”. Emergency? What emergency? – Yours, etc,
Prof BARRY McMULLIN,
Dublin City University,
Dublin 9.
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Sir, – Prof Hannah Daly, clearly a committed and ardent environmentalist, makes the mistake of conflating Ireland’s contribution to global warming with the current and historical polluters in the G8 and G20 countries (“Climate change: The great contradiction to Ireland’s response to global warming”, Opinion & Analysis, November 6th).
Prof Daly strenuously advocates for urgent and draconian lifestyle changes across all sectors of Irish society, which, in the light of the incontrovertible evidence outlined here, will have little or no impact on global warming.
While most people recognise that global warming is a real and an existential threat, it is an irrefutable scientific fact, as vouched by the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, that Ireland’s carbon footprint is minuscule, of the order of 0.11 per cent of the world total. Our land area is but 0.054 per cent of the world’s landmass, a mere dot on a global scale.
Countries are advised by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC) to adopt policies commensurate with their responsibility for climate change in line with their means, so why have we committed to having the “most ambitious climate action program in the world” and boasting of being world leaders and exemplars on climate matters, costing €150 billion?
While we in Ireland strive foolishly to be “best boys in the class”, it is instructive to compare how our neighbours and other countries are pragmatically dealing with climate change.
The UK and Norway have recently issued multiple exploration licences for oil and gas while Ireland has taken the bold but irrational decision to bar new licences even though we are now, and will be, almost entirely dependent on imports from the UK for decades, as back-up to unreliable renewables.
The UK has substantially cut back on climate change commitments.
India and China are opening hundreds of new coal mines.
Poland and the UK are opening new coalmines.
Germany, Hungary, Spain and France, among others, have reversed decisions to close coalmines early.
While the world is now appalled and consumed with the atrocities in the Ukraine and Gaza, the consequences for climate and global warming are alarming. The constant bombing and destruction of vast built-up areas have generated over 250,000 million tonnes of carbon emissions since Russia invaded the Ukraine, dwarfing Ireland’s contribution.
The recent increasingly violent storms, flooding and destruction in Ireland are the result of global warming generated elsewhere, and will inevitability continue with increasing ferocity and frequency.
Ireland should therefore review its lofty and unachievable climate ambitions and heed the advice of the UNIPCC to direct its resources on a countrywide adaptation drive to protect our coasts, cities, towns, villages and infrastructure against more ravages to come, as well as continuing to clean up our rivers, lakes and estuaries and recover our biodiversity. – Yours, etc,
JOHN LEAHY,
Cork.